PEORIA — Cold and allergy medicines containing a key ingredient used to make methamphetamine would become available by prescription only under newly introduced legislation intended to thwart production of the illicit stimulant.

State Sen. Dave Koehler, D-Peoria, has introduced a measure that would make pseudoephedrine a schedule III controlled substance in a joint effort with police to curb meth labs.

Senate Bill 3502, which would amend the Illinois Controlled Substances Act to include ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, has been referred to the Assignments Committee.

“We think it’s going to be a game changer in Illinois for meth,” Pekin police Chief Greg Nelson said Wednesday at a meeting for the Peoria Multi-County Narcotics Enforcement Group (P-MEG) policy board. “Pseudoephedrine is the only required ingredient to make meth.”

Meth manufacturing in Tazewell County and other rural areas of the state hit epidemic proportions a decade ago, leading to a local federal crackdown known as Operation Rattlesnake and new restrictions on cold medicine purchases.

Any medication containing pseudoephedrine has been removed from store shelves and placed behind pharmacy counters since a national mandate took effect in 2006. The identity of purchasers is recorded, and daily and monthly limits on purchase amounts have been instituted.

Those measures put a significant dent in meth production in the Pekin area, Nelson said. But availability of the drug is experiencing a resurgence, due in part to a simple but effective method to make small batches of meth in one bottle. Several people work together to obtain cold medicine for the process, evading detection through the sales monitoring system.

“This time, it’s completely different, partly because of the ‘shake and bake’ method, where people can basically cook their own,” Nelson said. “There are just many, many more people involved.”

If passed, Illinois would be the third state to return pseudoephedrine to controlled substance status since it was delisted as a federal controlled substance and allowed to be sold as an over-the-counter medication in the mid-1970s.

Oregon made pseudoephedrine available by prescription only in 2006, and Mississippi followed suit in 2010. Both states have reported vastly diminished meth lab incidents in the years since those measures took effect — with Oregon numbers showing lab incidents drop from 473 in 2003 to just nine in 2013 — according to state and federal figures.

“The prescription-only approach for (pseudoephedrine) appears to have contributed to reductions in lab incidents with unclear impacts on consumers and limited impacts on the health care system,” concluded a U.S. Government Accountability Office study from January 2013.

Yet similar measures in other states have failed, and the proposed Illinois law is expected to face resistance from drug manufacturers and retail groups, said Jennifer Allison, district director for Koehler.

Page 2 of 2 - A study funded by the Consumer Healthcare Products Association in February 2012 found diminished correlation between prescription-only status for pseudoephedrine and meth lab incidents in Oregon. That study by the Cascade Policy Institute concluded that decreasing lab seizures and reported methamphetamine use occurred in other states that did not enact prescription-only laws.

“Our review and analysis show that Oregon’s experience with methamphetamine manufacture and abuse since 2006 does not stand out from its neighbors or other parts of the United States,” the study stated.

Matt Buedel can be reached at 686-3154 or mbuedel@pjstar.com. Follow him on Twitter @JournoBuedel.